Terry Pratchett - Thief of Time

It was good tea, the doctor had to admit, but the acid in the air was making his eyes water.

“So, mm, how is the work on the new navigation tables going?” he said.

“Ginger bithcuit, thur?” said Igor, by his ear.

“Oh, er, yes… Oh, I say, these are rather good, Mr Igor.”

“Take two, thur.”

“Thank you.” Now Dr Hopkins sprayed crumbs as he spoke. “The navigation tables—” he repeated.

“I am afraid I have not been able to make very much progress,” said Jeremy. “I have been engaged on the properties of crystals.”

“Oh. Yes. You said. Well, of course we are very grateful for any time that you feel you can spare,” said Dr Hopkins. “And if I may say so, mm, it is good to see you with a new interest. Too much concentration on one thing is, mm, conducive to ill humours of the brain.”

“I have medicine,” said Jeremy.

“Yes, of course. Er, as a matter of fact, since I happened to be going past the apothecary today…” Dr Hopkins pulled a large, paper-wrapped bottle out of his pocket.

“Thank you.” Jeremy indicated the shelf behind him. “As you can see, I have nearly run out.”

“Yes, I thought you might,” said Dr Hopkins, as if the level of the bottle on Jeremy's shelf wasn't something the clockmakers kept a very careful eye on. “Well, I shall be going, then. Well done with the crystals. I used to collect butterflies when I was a boy. Wonderful things, hobbies. Give me a killing jar and a net and I was as happy as a little lark.”

Jeremy still smiled at him. There was something glassy about the smile.

Dr Hopkins swallowed the remainder of his tea and put the cup back in the saucer.

“And now I really must be on my way,” he mumbled. “So much to do. Don't wish to keep you from your work. Crystals, eh? Wonderful things. So pretty.”

“Are they?” said Jeremy. He hesitated, as though he was trying to solve a minor problem. “Oh, yes. Patterns of light.”

“Twinkly,” said Dr Hopkins.

Igor was waiting by the street door when Dr Hopkins reached it. He nodded.

“Mm… you are sure about the medicine?” the doctor said quietly.

“Oh yeth, thur. Twithe a day I watch him pour out a thpoonful.”

“Oh, good. He can be a little, er… sometimes he doesn't get on well with people.”

“Yeth, thur?”

“Very, um, very particular about accuracy…”

“Yeth, thur.”

“…which is a good thing, of course. Wonderful thing, accuracy,” said Dr Hopkins, and sniffed. “Up to a point, of course. Well, good day to you.”

“Good day, thur.”

When Igor returned to the workshop Jeremy was carefully pouring the blue medicine into a spoon. When the spoon was exactly full, he tipped it into the sink. “They check, you know,” he said. “They think I don't notice.”

“I'm thure they mean well, thur.”

“I'm afraid I can't think so well when I take the medicine,” he said. “In fact I think I'm getting on a lot better without it, don't you? It slows me down.”

Igor took refuge in silence. In his experience, many of the world's greatest discoveries were made by men who would be considered mad by conventional standards. Insanity depended on your point of view, he always said, and if it was the view through your own underpants then everything looked fine.

But young Master Jeremy was beginning to worry him. He never laughed, and Igor liked a good maniacal laugh. You could trust it. Since giving up the medicine, Jeremy had not, as Igor had expected, begun to gibber and shout things like “Mad! They said I was mad! But I shall show them all! Ahahahaha!” He'd simply become more—focused.

Then there was that smile. Igor was not easily frightened, because otherwise he wouldnl be able to look in a mirror, but he was becoming a little troubled.

“Now, where were we…?” said Jeremy. “Oh, yes, give me a hand here.”

Together they moved the table aside. Under it, dozens of glass jars hissed.

“Not enough power,” said Igor. “Altho, we have not got the mirrorth right yet, thur.”

Jeremy pulled the cloth off the device on the workbench. Glass and crystal glittered, and in some cases glittered very strangely. As Jeremy had remarked yesterday, in the clarity that was returning now that he was carefully pouring one spoonful of his medicine down the sink twice a day, some of the angles looked wrong. One crystal had disappeared when he'd locked it into place, but it was clearly still there because he could see the light reflecting off it.

“And we've thtill got too much metal in it, thur,” Igor grumbled. “It wath the thpring that did for the latht one.”

“We'll find a way,” said Jeremy.

“Home-made lightning ith never ath good ath the real thort,” said Igor.

“Good enough to test the principle,” said Jeremy.

“Tetht the printhiple, tetht the printhiple,” muttered Igor. “Thorry, thur, but Igorth do not ‘tetht the printhiple’. Thtrap it to the bench and put a good thick bolt of lightning through it, thatth our motto. Thatth how you tetht thomething.”

“You seem ill at ease, Igor.”

“Well, I'm thorry, thur,” said Igor. “It'th the climate dithagreeing with me. I'm uthed to regular thunderthtormth.”

“I've heard that some people really seem to come alive in thunderstorms,” said Jeremy, carefully adjusting the angle of a crystal.

“Ah, that wath when I worked for Baron Finklethtein,” said Igor.

Jeremy stood back. This wasn't the clock, of course. There was still a lot more work to do (but he could see it in front of him, if he closed his eyes) before they had a clock. This was just an essay, to see if he was on the right lines.

He was on the right lines. He knew it.

Tick

Susan walked back through the motionless streets, sat down in Madam Frout's office and let herself sink back into the stream of time.

She had never found out how this worked. It just did. Time didn't stop for the rest of the world, and it didn't stop for her—it was just that she entered a kind of loop of time, and everything else stayed exactly as it was until she'd finished what she needed to do.

It was another inherited family trait. It worked best if you didn't think about it, just like tightrope walking. Anyway, now she had other things to think about.

Madam Frout turned her gaze back from the rat-free mantelpiece. “Oh,” she said. “It seems to have gone.”

“It was probably a trick of the light, madam,” said Susan. Mostly human . Someone like me, she thought.

“Yes, er, of course…” Madam Frout managed to get her glasses on, despite the fact that the string was still tangled with the button. It meant that she'd moored herself to her own chest, but she was damned if she was going to do anything about it now.

Susan could unnerve a glacier. All she had to do was sit quietly, looking polite and alert.

“What precisely was it you wanted, madam?” she said. “It's just that I've left the class doing algebra, and they get restless when they've finished.”

“Algebra?” said Madam Frout, perforce staring at her own bosom, which no one else had ever done. “But that's far too difficult for seven-year-olds!”

“Yes, but I didn't tell them that and so far they haven't found out,” said Susan. It was time to move things along. “I expect you wanted to see me about my letter, madam?” she said.

Madam Frout looked blank. “Wh—” she began.

Susan sighed and snapped her fingers.

She walked round and opened a drawer by the motionless Madam Frout, removed a sheet of paper and spent some time carefully writing a letter. She let the ink dry, rustled the paper a bit to make it look slightly second-hand, and then put it just under the top of the pile of paperwork beside Madam Frout, with enough of it peeking out so that it would be easy to see.